Love Songs for Deadbeats Track-By-Track Breakdown

1. Monkey Pump

In a way, this was the first Midnight Crawl song, and it sort of started as a joke. We thought it would be funny to just hammer away on the same note for like, TOO long. We wrote the music a while back, then eventually decided to basically form a band around it. The title comes from the Eggers film The Lighthouse, so when Josh added vocals he drew inspiration from 1800s European absinthe illegalization and sailors from the time having to subsist on alcohol to stay alive and the paranoia of anti-alcohol advertising. To me, it’s got the overall theme of embracing chaos which runs throughout most of our songs.

2. The Stray

I’d finally gotten around to listening to Gang of Four, and was kind of obsessed with the angular guitars and the danciness of that band. The lyrics are about how so much good and healing comes from transgression, to the point that it’s basically sacred, which is sort of the way I understand punk rock.

3. Misery Makeout

This one’s basically about being miserable and responding to that by trying to have a lot of fun all the time, so like shoving a positive and a negative together, resulting in some weird fucked up thing that I recognize as not conventionally healthy, but I don’t care.

4. Wicked Wednesday

This is my take on the cliche of a song about a toxic lover/being addicted to pain and destruction. It’s kind of corny as hell, but in a way that I love.

5. The Wolf is Watching

This one is based on a dream that I had, where I was standing on a frozen lake and a giant wolf was staring at me from the woods. I told my friend about it and he told me it was Fenrir. So I drew from that myth for the lyrics, basically using it as a metaphor for how repressed psychic energy will inevitably boil over if you don’t find healthy ways to exercise it.